Kindergarten crowding in Schenectady

Enrollment has exploded at Schenectady schools. Kindergarten classes are overflowing with students and the district has frantically been hiring new teachers to handle the extra load.

Garrity, 30, would normally have weeks to prepare. But the City School District has been frantically pulling together new kindergarten classes as enrollment for five- and six-year olds has exploded. Four kindergarten sections have been added since school started and a fifth is on the way after about 100 young children unexpectedly showed up. The kindergarten enrollment is up to 930 kids, compared with 750 to 800 students per grade in middle school and up.

District officials expected a population boom this year across all grades, not for just one grade level. But the reason for such immediate growth in an upstate urban district has school and community leaders perplexed.

“This is something we’ve never seen,” said the district’s early childhood coordinator Susan Gorman. “Why so much right now doesn’t make sense.”

Okay Art. I will try logic. If the magnet program at Howe had not been moved, where do you think that district would be sending those extra hundred kindergarten students? That’s right, into existing buildings where kindergarten classes reportedly already over 20 children.

Classroom space is overcrowded so you close the best grade school and throw those children in with Middle Schoolers? How does that help overcrowding? It not over 20 it’s over 35 kids.

Maybe some of the overpaid “administrators” can plan ahead? Let’s try firing administrators and hiring kindergarden teachers. There is no playground for Howe students at Central Park. No wonder Schenectady is at the bottom of the barrel-again.

How were this many children “unexpected’? Did they not register? If this is the case the school should not be scrambling to accomodate them. The lack of time to prepare for the teachers, disorganization of the schools, etc is not beneficial to these children or the other children in the schools. If this many parents screwed up the children should have to wait until next year, it os completely unfair to the rest of the students to impose this type of chaos.